gsfprez:Jessis - get your stories straight... i mean, if the poster wants a silent computer so that he doesnt have to hear the fan blowing all the time.. they call them iMacs and fucking Jobsian G4 Cubes... there's no need to bother with some weird ass hydro-powered case like it was a fucking Russian sub with James Bond at the tiller.
I was going to post that if nobody else did..
I have two iMacs - a 2nd gen 333mhz and a 3rd gen 500mhz. The 333 came with a fan, like standard PCs, and the 500 was Apple's new fanless design. Comparing the two, the 500 is faster and quieter than the 333 - the only noise is when the HD is working a lot or when I've got a CD/DVD in the drive. I haven't noticed that the 500 runs any hotter than the 333, and time to time I've even noticed more heat pouring out of the older machine. The older one had a sucky sound card and speakers, but I couldn't tell because of the blow dryer sound coming from the back. The fanless design and built in Harmon Kardon speakers/soundcard make my 500 sound better than a lot of stereos I've seen.
Compared to a PC, the fanless iMac still runs cooler than an old AMD 486/80 box I recently turned into a flower planter. Hell of a lot more useful, too.
macpeep wrote:You are using quotation marks but I'm pretty sure nobody said exactly that.
My apologies if I misled anyone. My quotes were intended to be a sarcastic paraphrase of what Microsoft executives have said and done over the last month or so. Their varying statements and actions do contradict, even if the specific comments from Mr. Mundie do not contradict each other.
While Mundie writes about advantages and disadvantages of open source software, Jim Allchin claims free software hurts innovation, Steve Ballmer brags about partners accessing Windows source, and Bill Gates says Linux poses no threat to their financial stability or marketshare. (At the same time Microsoft is giving away free software left and right so it can damage competitors and their innovation.) As I said before, somebody needs to decide what Microsoft's Linux / open source FUD will be and stick to it instead of having everybody go around contradicting each other.
Nonetheless, in future postings I'll make note if I'm actually quoting someone or just making a general statement about what they mean.
If everybody will jump up and down at the same time, Earth's orbit will shift and the asteroid will miss us by miles. We could at least jump enough so the thing only lands in a place nobody cares about - like France or Seattle.
sleeper0:This statement is blatently false. Did you even try to do any research? Perhaps you are thinking of Real? Microsoft's player, encoder, and DRM tools are all available for free. Almost everything can be instantly downloaded over the internet.
To get decent results with streaming WindowsMedia (as compared to the static kind that would be used with Napster), you have to buy a specialized Microsoft streaming server, which runs on Windows. So you pay for the media server software and then pay for the OS. (Real will run on Unix and Windows, QuickTime on Mac and Windows, MP3 will stream from any signifcant platform.)
If Napster uses WMA exclusively, that will give Microsoft a huge lead over the competition and could put RealNetworks out of business. (Why use Real for streams if everybody has a WM player already for static audio?) If MP3, Real, and QuickTime are gone, everybody that wants to stream media has to run Windows servers. That turns the Windows desktop OS monopoly into a media monopoly, and turns the media monopoly into a streaming server monopoly... Once we start sliding down this slope, it's hard to stop.
And if you think the tools will still be free once WindowsMedia is the only codec, you're insane.
My point being, Microsoft wants to kill MP3 so it can make WindowsMedia the standard and make money selling servers and (eventually) selling tools that are now free. Plus the control it will have over us all, which is also a draw for them I'm sure.
Microsoft charges money, lots of it, for tools that encrypt audio and video into the Windows Media format. Imagine how much money they could make if that was made a 'standard' for all streaming media. The way to have WM made into a standard is to make it appealing to the RIAA and its member companies by taking control away from the end user.
If Microsoft killed off Napster, or killed off MP3 on Napster, the RIAA and its member companies would be so grateful that Windows Media would be made a standard format almost immediately. Microsoft isn't talking to Napster because they want to preserve online music - they're talking to Napster because they want to have a monopoly on streaming media.
What could they possibly add to Office that would warrant paying the upgrade cost? I know our company RARELY uses any of the bells and whistles later versions have provided. I don't see anything in the feature list that would benefit anyone I know to upgrade.
Microsoft is pushing people to buy Office XP not for the new features but because it hides Clippy. That's pretty much it. $300 for an upgrade just to hide the Office Assistants (they'll still be on the help menu, just not on by default). Microsoft could release a 100KB patch to do the same thing. [Also see News.com, The Register, and MSBC NewsSource.]
So what does XP stand for? eXtra Profits, of course.
And? Where is the problem?
Microsoft won't prevent users from loading unsigned video drivers, or XP fail completely as a game^H^H^H^Hconsumer OS. So all you need is to write a fake video driver that searches for the code that checks the 'Microsoft approved' test and disables it.
Microsoft will either require all drivers to be signed, set up the driver development program so unsigned drivers can't descramble the encrypted signals (making them useless), or 'fix' Media Playwhore so it won't play audio files without signed drivers being present. It's not that farfetched - remember six years ago nobody ever thought they'd go so far as tying IE to Windows.
I guess now instead of just worrying about somebody from China or Iraq hacking in Yahoo, we have to worry about them hacking into Dick Cheney. Great...
This is similar to what Microsoft is planning for Windows XP's sound infrastucture. XP will send all sound signals to the sound card with some kind of encrypted static in them. The card, using a Microsoft-approved driver, will then decode the signal and remove the static for playback [see The Register].
Its all intended to prevent us from somehow getting between the OS and hardware to 'steal' audio (and video, with the monitor system) after the software decodes it. Microsoft is jonesing to help the RIAA kill MP3 and replace it with WMA, and the best way to do that is sucking up to the RIAA and its member companies by taking control away from the end user/listener. Yet another reason to Boycott Microsoft!
Gates founded Corbis several years ago, 1995 or 1996 as I recall, so he'd have somewhere to store the Codex, which he had purchased at an auction some time before. Corbis has since then bought out the Bettmann Archives (10 million + photos), plus the original photographic archives of the Chicago Tribune, United Press International, Sharpshoters, New York Daily News, Saba Press (French), and other news agencies. Corbis has additionally purchased smaller archives of fine artwork, and has exclusive digital reproduction rights to the collections of several major museums.
Gates wants to control all intellectual property and licensing rights to most of history's artifacts. The only companies anywhere near the size of Corbis are Getty Images, Corel's Photodisc division, and Superstock. Next time you get a magazine like Time or (especially) US News and there's a generic or historical photo in it, check the margins and see if it doesn't give a credit to Corbis. I just picked a random news magazine off my desk and 2/3 of the stock and historical photos in it were credited to Corbis or Corbis/Bettmann.
Additionally, Corbis is taking millions of photos that have never been digitally reproduced and locking them into an old mine in Pennsylvania for safe keeping. The company apparently has no plans to ever make copies of them, and will let them rot in that mine instead of hiring more employees to speed up the process of sharing them with the public. (see WinInfo for a decent report)
Why don't we all join together and start our own country? Napster is rumored to be going offshore to avoid US copyright law, so lets all go offshore with it and set up The United States of Napster or The People's Republic of Free Tunes. Our nation would have no copyright law and we would have a clause in the constitution agreeing not to sign any treaties with other countries concerning intellectual property. We could get online and download all the free music we wanted and also never pay for software again.
And since it was my idea, I get to be lord high emperor.
Microsoft, protector of intellectual property rights - except for the ones of its customers. Yes, how soon we forget the Passport.com Terms of Use fiasco and how good THAT was for intellectual property... Bunch of hypocritical jerks.
...and that was today's episode of As The Massively Obvious Security Hole Turns, brought to you, as always, by Microsoft! 'Microsoft - What Do YOU Want To Crack Today?'
[annoying organ music]
Kids, don't forget to send in those Ovalteem labels for your free Windows XP Product Activation DECODER RINGS!
Tune in next week for our latest episode - Clippy's Revenge!
[more annoying organ music, followed by station identification]
Microsoft always does this.. They purchase names people will recognize, because recognizable well-known names will sell games - no matter what the quality is. They bought Fafsa and Virtual Worlds Entertainment for MechWarrior and BattleTech, they bought Access for Links... They've never produced an original game inhouse - everything they offer was purchased from (or with) some other company. Now they've bought the rights to produce some POS online game and attach the Matrix name to it. Microsoft is where good ideas go to die.
The replies to my original post so far exceed 2,000 characters (including the/. formatting). You all together owe me in excess of $100,000. Since I have no way to identify or track you, I'll just send my bill to Slashdot and OSDN. If they cannot pay my bill, then I'll hire a patent attorney and tomorrow you'll all be posting on Pauldot.org
Tomorrow I'm going to contact the patent office and file a claim on the following:
"Method of using symbols or verbal / musical tones to communicate thoughts, ideas, and emotions between individuals."
I'll charge $10 for every letter typed and $50 for every spoken syllable (special discounts available - contact me for details). That takes care of me ever having to work again, saving my time and energy for more valuable things like playing all the way through Doom in less than eight hours.
ZD in the 80's and ZDNet in the 1990's/2000's are entirely different creatures. Times change, editors move on, standards shift... And ZDNet has never been much more than a whitewashed politically correct channel for wire stories and chopped down articles from ZD magazines anyway. Beyond that, ZDNet hasn't even been owned by Ziff-Davis in three years - their corporate parent Softbank spun it off to take advantage of the dotcom stock boom and CNET recently bought them out. (So why does ZDNet still run ZD magazine stories? Licensing.)
Gamecenter didn't close because it was losing money, but because CNET bought the ZD whores and their game site Gamespot was slightly more popular and has an international presence. Now Gamespot has been spun off as a separate company owned by CNet, instead of just being a ZD site. That notwithstanding, Gamecenter was a lot better than GS will ever be.
Doctors rotate being on call, they're too important for a hospital to make them stay by the pager 24/7. Techs at hospitals are the same way, they rotate their schedule. Techs get paid by the hour during the day, and don't get paid for being on call until they have to come in - then they get at least 2 hours pay, even if the procedure takes 10 minutes. But that's just one specific hospital where I worked, I'm not sure if they all do it that way. Nonetheless, it would be a good system for IT/IS departments to use.
So we can assume Pioneer 10 isn't running Windows 68... That could explain the probe disappearances: maybe NASA is running Windows CE or NT Embedded on the new projects (just like the ISS). Every time one gets close to the surface of some distant planet, it gets a BSOD.
"HAL, copy music!"
"I'm sorry, Dave, you know I cannot copy music that the RIAA doesn't say you own."
Are the Russians making any claims about this capsule only being used by a little old lady going to the Moon on Sundays? That might increase the appeal, if they're marketing it to the average new car purchaser.
Maybe if they offered easy financing and a low down payment...
"THEY CALL ME CRAZY BORIS - I PRICE EM SO LOW, THESE CAPSULES HAVE GOTTA GO!!"
There's a way to avoid the T-shirt inventory problem. At least one site, CafePress, allows anybody to set up a store selling shirts, mousepads, etc. with their own designs. The inventory problem is eliminated by CafePress printing every item to order - when your site visitors go and order a t-shirt, CafePress prints it and mails it. They handle production, ordering, billing, and distribution. That's it, no extra inventory laying around and no upfront expense. You get a cut of every item sold, depending on the price you set.
Of course, CafePress has to keep their costs down so they only offer a limited selection of items and styles (I'd kill for black or blue shirts instead of white) and the base price for most items is a little too high. That notwithstanding, it's still a good idea that eliminates the risk of printing your own shirts and the hassle of running a Web shopping cart. Definitely a way to increase revenue for your site.
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gsfprez: Jessis - get your stories straight... i mean, if the poster wants a silent computer so that he doesnt have to hear the fan blowing all the time.. they call them iMacs and fucking Jobsian G4 Cubes... there's no need to bother with some weird ass hydro-powered case like it was a fucking Russian sub with James Bond at the tiller.
I was going to post that if nobody else did..
I have two iMacs - a 2nd gen 333mhz and a 3rd gen 500mhz. The 333 came with a fan, like standard PCs, and the 500 was Apple's new fanless design. Comparing the two, the 500 is faster and quieter than the 333 - the only noise is when the HD is working a lot or when I've got a CD/DVD in the drive. I haven't noticed that the 500 runs any hotter than the 333, and time to time I've even noticed more heat pouring out of the older machine. The older one had a sucky sound card and speakers, but I couldn't tell because of the blow dryer sound coming from the back. The fanless design and built in Harmon Kardon speakers/soundcard make my 500 sound better than a lot of stereos I've seen.
Compared to a PC, the fanless iMac still runs cooler than an old AMD 486/80 box I recently turned into a flower planter. Hell of a lot more useful, too.
My apologies if I misled anyone. My quotes were intended to be a sarcastic paraphrase of what Microsoft executives have said and done over the last month or so. Their varying statements and actions do contradict, even if the specific comments from Mr. Mundie do not contradict each other.
While Mundie writes about advantages and disadvantages of open source software, Jim Allchin claims free software hurts innovation, Steve Ballmer brags about partners accessing Windows source, and Bill Gates says Linux poses no threat to their financial stability or marketshare. (At the same time Microsoft is giving away free software left and right so it can damage competitors and their innovation.) As I said before, somebody needs to decide what Microsoft's Linux / open source FUD will be and stick to it instead of having everybody go around contradicting each other.
Nonetheless, in future postings I'll make note if I'm actually quoting someone or just making a general statement about what they mean.
"We have made Windows source code available to thousands of partners. .. Open source software is dangerous and kills innovation."
Somebody needs to call a meeting and decide what the standard line will be.... FUD isn't effective when it contradicts itself.
If everybody will jump up and down at the same time, Earth's orbit will shift and the asteroid will miss us by miles. We could at least jump enough so the thing only lands in a place nobody cares about - like France or Seattle.
To get decent results with streaming WindowsMedia (as compared to the static kind that would be used with Napster), you have to buy a specialized Microsoft streaming server, which runs on Windows. So you pay for the media server software and then pay for the OS. (Real will run on Unix and Windows, QuickTime on Mac and Windows, MP3 will stream from any signifcant platform.)
If Napster uses WMA exclusively, that will give Microsoft a huge lead over the competition and could put RealNetworks out of business. (Why use Real for streams if everybody has a WM player already for static audio?) If MP3, Real, and QuickTime are gone, everybody that wants to stream media has to run Windows servers. That turns the Windows desktop OS monopoly into a media monopoly, and turns the media monopoly into a streaming server monopoly... Once we start sliding down this slope, it's hard to stop.
And if you think the tools will still be free once WindowsMedia is the only codec, you're insane.
My point being, Microsoft wants to kill MP3 so it can make WindowsMedia the standard and make money selling servers and (eventually) selling tools that are now free. Plus the control it will have over us all, which is also a draw for them I'm sure.
If Microsoft killed off Napster, or killed off MP3 on Napster, the RIAA and its member companies would be so grateful that Windows Media would be made a standard format almost immediately. Microsoft isn't talking to Napster because they want to preserve online music - they're talking to Napster because they want to have a monopoly on streaming media.
Microsoft is pushing people to buy Office XP not for the new features but because it hides Clippy. That's pretty much it. $300 for an upgrade just to hide the Office Assistants (they'll still be on the help menu, just not on by default). Microsoft could release a 100KB patch to do the same thing. [Also see News.com, The Register, and MSBC NewsSource.]
Microsoft won't prevent users from loading unsigned video drivers, or XP fail completely as a game^H^H^H^Hconsumer OS. So all you need is to write a fake video driver that searches for the code that checks the 'Microsoft approved' test and disables it.
Microsoft will either require all drivers to be signed, set up the driver development program so unsigned drivers can't descramble the encrypted signals (making them useless), or 'fix' Media Playwhore so it won't play audio files without signed drivers being present. It's not that farfetched - remember six years ago nobody ever thought they'd go so far as tying IE to Windows.
This is similar to what Microsoft is planning for Windows XP's sound infrastucture. XP will send all sound signals to the sound card with some kind of encrypted static in them. The card, using a Microsoft-approved driver, will then decode the signal and remove the static for playback [see The Register].
Its all intended to prevent us from somehow getting between the OS and hardware to 'steal' audio (and video, with the monitor system) after the software decodes it. Microsoft is jonesing to help the RIAA kill MP3 and replace it with WMA, and the best way to do that is sucking up to the RIAA and its member companies by taking control away from the end user/listener. Yet another reason to Boycott Microsoft!
Gates wants to control all intellectual property and licensing rights to most of history's artifacts. The only companies anywhere near the size of Corbis are Getty Images, Corel's Photodisc division, and Superstock. Next time you get a magazine like Time or (especially) US News and there's a generic or historical photo in it, check the margins and see if it doesn't give a credit to Corbis. I just picked a random news magazine off my desk and 2/3 of the stock and historical photos in it were credited to Corbis or Corbis/Bettmann.
Additionally, Corbis is taking millions of photos that have never been digitally reproduced and locking them into an old mine in Pennsylvania for safe keeping. The company apparently has no plans to ever make copies of them, and will let them rot in that mine instead of hiring more employees to speed up the process of sharing them with the public. (see WinInfo for a decent report)
And since it was my idea, I get to be lord high emperor.
Microsoft, protector of intellectual property rights - except for the ones of its customers. Yes, how soon we forget the Passport.com Terms of Use fiasco and how good THAT was for intellectual property... Bunch of hypocritical jerks.
[annoying organ music]
Kids, don't forget to send in those Ovalteem labels for your free Windows XP Product Activation DECODER RINGS!
Tune in next week for our latest episode - Clippy's Revenge!
[more annoying organ music, followed by station identification]
Microsoft always does this.. They purchase names people will recognize, because recognizable well-known names will sell games - no matter what the quality is. They bought Fafsa and Virtual Worlds Entertainment for MechWarrior and BattleTech, they bought Access for Links... They've never produced an original game inhouse - everything they offer was purchased from (or with) some other company. Now they've bought the rights to produce some POS online game and attach the Matrix name to it. Microsoft is where good ideas go to die.
The replies to my original post so far exceed 2,000 characters (including the /. formatting). You all together owe me in excess of $100,000. Since I have no way to identify or track you, I'll just send my bill to Slashdot and OSDN. If they cannot pay my bill, then I'll hire a patent attorney and tomorrow you'll all be posting on Pauldot.org
"Method of using symbols or verbal / musical tones to communicate thoughts, ideas, and emotions between individuals."
I'll charge $10 for every letter typed and $50 for every spoken syllable (special discounts available - contact me for details). That takes care of me ever having to work again, saving my time and energy for more valuable things like playing all the way through Doom in less than eight hours.
ZD in the 80's and ZDNet in the 1990's/2000's are entirely different creatures. Times change, editors move on, standards shift... And ZDNet has never been much more than a whitewashed politically correct channel for wire stories and chopped down articles from ZD magazines anyway. Beyond that, ZDNet hasn't even been owned by Ziff-Davis in three years - their corporate parent Softbank spun it off to take advantage of the dotcom stock boom and CNET recently bought them out. (So why does ZDNet still run ZD magazine stories? Licensing.)
Gamecenter didn't close because it was losing money, but because CNET bought the ZD whores and their game site Gamespot was slightly more popular and has an international presence. Now Gamespot has been spun off as a separate company owned by CNet, instead of just being a ZD site. That notwithstanding, Gamecenter was a lot better than GS will ever be.
ZDNet - Diluting quality since 1995(TM)
Doctors rotate being on call, they're too important for a hospital to make them stay by the pager 24/7. Techs at hospitals are the same way, they rotate their schedule. Techs get paid by the hour during the day, and don't get paid for being on call until they have to come in - then they get at least 2 hours pay, even if the procedure takes 10 minutes. But that's just one specific hospital where I worked, I'm not sure if they all do it that way. Nonetheless, it would be a good system for IT/IS departments to use.
"HAL, copy music!"
"I'm sorry, Dave, you know I cannot copy music that the RIAA doesn't say you own."
"I don't get to sign all my personal information and intellectual property over to Microsoft? DARN!"
Are the Russians making any claims about this capsule only being used by a little old lady going to the Moon on Sundays? That might increase the appeal, if they're marketing it to the average new car purchaser.
Maybe if they offered easy financing and a low down payment...
"THEY CALL ME CRAZY BORIS - I PRICE EM SO LOW, THESE CAPSULES HAVE GOTTA GO!!"
Of course, CafePress has to keep their costs down so they only offer a limited selection of items and styles (I'd kill for black or blue shirts instead of white) and the base price for most items is a little too high. That notwithstanding, it's still a good idea that eliminates the risk of printing your own shirts and the hassle of running a Web shopping cart. Definitely a way to increase revenue for your site.